Governments around the world have dramatically increased their efforts to manipulate information on social media over the past year. Online content manipulation contributed to a seventh consecutive year of overall decline in internet freedom, along with a rise in disruptions to mobile internet service and increases in physical and technical attacks on human rights defenders and independent media.

Representatives of the power company Elektroprivreda BiH and two Sarajevo-based public broadcasting services, the national BHRT and the entity RTV FBiH, signed a business contract on collection of TV license fee together with electricity bills, which will be displayed on bills for the month of August of 2017. Along with these two broadcasters, the public broadcasting system of B&H also comprises RTV Republika Srpska which could not take part in this legal solution for fee collection because Elektroprivreda BiH supplies electricity only to Bosniak-majority parts of the B&H Federation.

08.03.2017: Project Research team "Partnership in Southeast Europe for the Development of the Media"

For example, according to the Bosnian report, only 10% of the news space is reserved to foreign news. Against the background of a quite eventful year, what was on the rise was “the so-called analytical opus, i.e. the correlation 􀄸of the international events􀄹 with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s international position.” The Albanian daily Panorama sported no news on the Brexit vote on the very day of the referendum, but only an editorial. All the same, on November 8, 2016the newspaper did not mention anything on US elections and did not have a “world” section at all. On the other hand, “in a very unusual move for the Albanian media”, Top Channel TV station devoted the whole main news edition of June 24 to the reporting and analysis of the Brexit referendum, from voting, to economics, and even to the expected effects on sports. The Macedonian report notes that “false news is the only direct link between the American presidential elections and Macedonia”, despite the big appetite for news on this topic of the local public. Instead, “it received sketchy information that was often not properly framed, and there was no thorough analysis in the domestic media”, reads the report.

15.02.2017: Project Research team "Partnership in Southeast Europe for the Development of the Media"

The research aims to provide an up-to-date, comparative environmental analysis of the journalism education and the media literacy programs available in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. It provides information on the education needs in journalism profession and the general public as well as an overview of the environmental factors in the basis of the media literacy.

The situation of public service media displays every major problem of the media sector in the region. The grip of the partial political interests in which these institutions find themselves is so strong that their operations constitute a kind of barometer for the state of media freedom.

465 future journalists and students who are supposed to become professional communicators enroll at faculties in BiH every year. About 30 to 70 percent graduate every year, which is around 200 students. According to Media Plan Institute’s estimates, an equal number of students from other faculties decide to try their luck in journalism and PR, as a result of which there are around 400 people formally on the market every year who seek or can perform the work of professional communicators. We are using this term because faculty curricula, even if they are formally called just faculties of journalism, are actually communicology departments where students study various aspects of public and public opinion, sociological and marketing aspects, investigative procedures as well as journalism skills, which according to many opinions are the weakest segment of university education of journalists.

The Council of Ministers of B-H has decided to extend the current method of user fee collection for Broadcasting Services via telecoms operators until 30th of June. By doing so, they accepted the amendment to the B-H Public Broadcasting System Legislation due to numerous appeals by the Public Broadcasting Services. This decision supported by the force of law, creates a five month transitional period to find a stable method of public services funding. However, it is clear that intensive negotiations not only about the problems of collecting the Public Broadcast fee, but also about its overall structure¸ are about to begin.

Representatives of fourteen member organisations of SEENPM met on 30 October in Tirana for an annual meeting of the General Assembly. The General Assembly also voted to elect three new members to the five-member SEENPM Board. Mladen Velojiæ of Media & Reform Center, Serbia; Barıº Altıntaº of Platform 24, Turkey; and Ljiljana Žugiæ of the Montenegro Media Institute replaced three members whose terms had expired: Corina Cepoi of IJC Moldova, Ilona Moricz of the Centre for Independent Journalism, Hungary; and Ioana Avadani of the Centre for Independent Journalism, Romania.

A crowded and rather poor media market, unable to secure the sustainability of media operations, a high level of job insecurity making the journalists vulnerable to political and economic pressures and – more often than not – leading to self-censorship – are some of the conclusions of the Regional report on the Employment Conditions of Journalists in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia launched by the Center for Independent Journalism in Bucharest, to mark May 3 – World Press Freedom Day...

Published by Media
Plan Institute . All rights reserved. Views and opinions presented
in the articles published by Media Online are those of the authors,
and they are not necessarily endorsed by Media Online. Articles
and all other texts can be reprinted free of charge but with full
crediting of the author and Media Online including Media Online's
URL.